Montana Creeds: Tyler. Linda Lael Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ get in,” Hal said. “That sun’s hot enough to bake a man’s brain.”

      Tyler opened the right rear door of the Taurus, and he and Kit Carson took their places alongside Tess, the dog in the middle. Delighted, Tess shared the last of her crackers with Kit.

      “Obliged,” Tyler said.

      “My daddy died when I was four,” Tess said. “In a plane crash.”

      Lily tensed. Oddly, Tess often confided the great tragedy of her short life in strangers. With counselors and well-meaning friends, she tended to clam up.

      “I’m sorry to hear that, shortstop,” Tyler told her.

      “Is hoofing it the same as hitchhiking?” Tess asked. “Because hitchhiking is very dangerous. That’s what Mom says.”

      Lily felt Tyler’s gaze on the back of her neck, practically branding her sweaty flesh.

      “Your mom’s right,” Tyler answered. “But Kit and I didn’t have much choice, as it turned out.”

      “You could have called Logan or Dylan,” Hal said.

      Lily wondered at the note of caution in her father’s voice, but she was too busy merging back onto the highway to pursue the thought very far.

      “Cold day in hell,” Tyler said.

      Lily cleared her throat.

      “Cold day in heck, then,” he amended wryly.

      “Who are Logan and Dylan?” Tess asked.

      “My half brothers,” Tyler replied, belatedly buckling his seat belt.

      “Don’t you like them?” Tess wanted to know.

      “We had a falling out,” Tyler said.

      “What’s that?” Tess persisted.

      Risking a glance in the rearview mirror, Lily saw him ruffle Tess’s dark blond hair. She had Burke’s green eyes, and his outgoing personality, too. Telling her not to talk to strangers was pretty much a waste of time—not that Tyler Creed was a stranger, strictly speaking.

      “A fight,” Tyler said.

       “Oh,” Tess said, sounding intrigued. “I like your dog.”

      “Me, too.”

      Lily sat ramrod-straight in the sticky vinyl seat. Concentrated on her driving. She’d thought a lot about Tyler Creed since she’d hurried out to Montana to keep a vigil at her father’s bedside, but she hadn’t expected to actually run into him. He was a famous rodeo cowboy, after all—a sometime stuntman and actor, and he did commercials, too.

      People like that were, well, transitory. Weren’t they?

      Wandering through her kitchen with a basket of laundry one day a few years before, she’d glimpsed him on the countertop TV, hawking boxer-briefs, and had to sit down because of heart palpitations. Burke, an airline pilot by profession, had been between flights, and asked her what was the matter.

      She’d said she was getting her period, and felt woozy.

      She’d felt woozy, all right, but it had nothing to do with her cycle.

      “Grampa and I wanted hamburgers for lunch,” Tess informed her fellow passenger, “but she said it would clog our arterials, so now we have to wait and eat salad with tofu .”

      “Ouch,” Tyler commented. “That bites.”

      Lily pushed down harder on the accelerator.

      “Where shall we drop you off?” she asked sunnily, when they finally, finally hit the outskirts of Stillwater Springs. The place looked pretty much the same—a little shabbier, a little smaller.

      “The car-repair place,” Tyler replied.

      Lily had forgotten how sparely he used words, never saying two when one would do. She’d also forgotten that he smelled like laundry dried in fresh air and sunlight, even after he’d been loading or unloading hay bales all day. Or walking along a highway under a blazing summer sun. That his mouth tilted up at one corner when he was amused, and his hair was always a shade too long. The way his clothes fit him, and how he seemed so comfortable in his own skin…

       Do not think about skin, Lily told herself, aware that her father was watching her intently out of the corner of his eye, and that that eye was twinkling.

      “Thanks for the ride,” Tyler said, when they pulled up to the only mechanic’s garage in town. Kit Carson jumped out after him.

      “Bye!” Tess called, as though she and Tyler Creed were old friends.

      “Anytime,” Lily lied.

      He walked away, without looking back.

      Just as he had that last summer, when Lily, high on teenage passion and exactly half a bottle of light beer, had proposed marriage to him. He’d said they were both too young, and ought to cool it for a while, before they got in too deep.

      Lily had been crushed, then mortified.

      Tyler had simply walked away. Later, she’d learned that while he was dating her, ending every evening with a chaste peck on the cheek and a “sleep tight,” he’d passed what remained of the night in bed with a divorced waitress twice his age.

      The memory of that discovery still stung Lily to the quick.

      He’d written songs for her, sung them to her in a low vibrato, aching with heart, played them on his guitar.

      He’d taken her to movies, and for long walks along moonlit country roads.

      He’d won three teddy bears and a four-foot stuffed giraffe at the county fair, and given them to her.

      And all the time, he’d been boinking a waitress with a hot body and a Harley-Davidson tattoo on her right forearm.

      Lily was a grown woman, a widow, with a young daughter, a sick father and a successful career in merchandising under her belt. And damn, it still hurt to remember that the songs and the movies and the romantic walks had meant nothing to him.

      Nothing to him, everything to her.

      “Water under the bridge,” her father commented quietly. “Let’s go home, Lily.”

       Let’s go home, Lily.

      Hal had said that the night she’d come to the clinic, where he was working late, after the breakup with Tyler, carrying her bleeding, broken heart in her hands. She’d cried, and said she never wanted to see Tyler Creed again as long as she lived. Hal’s jaw had tightened, and he’d put an arm around her shoulders, held her close for a few moments.

       He’s Jake Creed’s boy, honey, Hal had said. They’re poison, those Creeds. Every one of them. You’re better off without him.

      She’d sobbed, СКАЧАТЬ